The International Journal of Computer Game Research

Our Mission - To explore the rich cultural genre of games; to give scholars a peer-reviewed forum for their ideas and theories; to provide an academic channel for the ongoing discussions on games and gaming.

Game Studies is a non-profit, open-access, crossdisciplinary journal dedicated to games research, web-published several times a year at www.gamestudies.org.

Our primary focus is aesthetic, cultural and communicative aspects of computer games, but any previously unpublished article focused on games and gaming is welcome. Proposed articles should be jargon-free, and should attempt to shed new light on games, rather than simply use games as metaphor or illustration of some other theory or phenomenon.



Game Studies is published with the support of:

The Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet)

The Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils for the Humanities and the Social Sciences

Blekinge Institute of Technology

IT University of Copenhagen

Lund University

If you would like to make a donation to the Game Studies Foundation, which is a non-profit foundation established for the purpose of ensuring continuous publication of Game Studies, please contact the Editor-in-Chief or send an email to: foundation at gamestudies dot org
To the (fictional) concentration camp: Wrestling with Jewish Pain and Emptiness in Brenda Romero’s Train

by Imo Kaufman

This article examines the boardgame Train as a site of Jewish emptiness and stresses the importance of researcher positionality, especially when discussing generational trauma(s) depicted in games. Through a Jewish lens, it disaggregates scholarly work surrounding Train and considers the wider implications of our analysis as researchers. [more]
Videogame Adaptations as Opportunities for Remembering Gameplay

by Bjarke Liboriussen

This paper counters overreliance on narrative tropes by framing the reception of film adaptations of videogames as opportunities for remembering gameplay. Taking a grounded cognition approach to remembering, the paper pays special attention to the body and to genres. [more]
Rendering in Analog Games: Dissected Puzzles and Georgian Death Culture

by Sean Purcell

This essay details the dissected puzzle’s (the jigsaw puzzle) as a result of British colonial death culture to show the wider cultural ramifications of material practices in games. [more]
The Need for Recategorized Video Game Labels: A Quantitative Approach

by Richard J. Simonson, Joseph R. Keebler, Shawn Doherty

A quantitative approach to comparing video games based on included genres via Stress Majorization of a COmplicated Function (SMACOF) Multidimensional Scaling (MDS). [more]

Book Reviews

Review: Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification

by J. Tuomas Harviainen

Experimental Games (2020) by Patrick Jagoda. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN: 9780226629971. pp. 320. [more]

 

©2001 - 2023 Game Studies Copyright for articles published in this journal is retained by the journal, except for the right to republish in printed paper publications, which belongs to the authors, but with first publication rights granted to the journal. By virtue of their appearance in this open access journal, articles are free to use, with proper attribution, in educational and other non-commercial settings.